Of Chariot-Women and Motherlines
in response to the new discovery of matrilocal iron age burials in celtic britain
NOTE: this is the first part of a series I will be sharing with paid subscribers this spring about my motherline pilgrimages in Yorkshire. I will not be posting any more MOTHER ANIMAL chapters here because *** we have a book deal*** ! I’ll share all the official details about that very soon. It’s the best New Year’s gift a writer could ever wish for and I’m so thrilled.
For now, happy reading and thank you so much for your presence and community here.
(Recording is all the way at the bottom of the post, for paid readers only)
Of Chariot-Women and Motherlines
The Iron Age women’s burials around Pocklington in East Yorkshire have long been called the graves of queens.
One woman was buried on top of her chariot wheels, which were studded with coral from the Mediterranean. Beside her was an iron mirror polished bright and carved with coiling Celtic knots. Another had long strands of blue and white glass beads around her neck, and rings of both amber and gold on her fingers, and a bronze brooch inlaid with white coral. I like to imagine that one or the other of them were laid on bear or wolf skins that have since disintegrated.
These were women of an old Britain who spoke old languages, maybe Celtic ones, that are now lost. They might have been Parisii women, daughters of the Gauls who had come from the mainland, or they might have been daughters of a Bronze Age people who had lived in the Yorkshire wolds long before. Very little is known of them, except their beads and brooches, except their coral-studded chariot wheels and polished mirrors.
I like to think that archaeological discoveries are communications from the dead to the living. They are moments when the ancestors decide to show us something we need to see. Between 1815 and 1817, when these burials were first excavated by three locals—William Watson, the Rev E. W. Stillingfleet, and Barnard Clarkson— the dead must have thought these so-called “men of the gentry,” and therefore greater Regency England, needed a little face-to-face with a warrior-queen and a mirror-scrying lady-seer.
As it happens, in the West of Yorkshire during almost precisely those same years, a baby girl named Charlotte Brontë was born in 1816, followed by her sister Emily in 1818, and then Anne in 1820. Sisters we are with you, sisters you are not alone, I imagine the chariot-queen with her coral-inlaid wheels (an earlier Boudica) and the mirror-scrying priestess with her amber rings (an earlier Veleda) singing in secret over the baptisms of those girls, from inside the earth— those three who were born carrying novels that would claim new sovereignty for the female voice.
Now, it seems the Iron Age women of East Riding—and of greater Britain—are speaking again these two hundred years later.
Just last Wednesday, on January 15th, a groundbreaking study was published by a group of geneticists and archaeologists working primarily at Trinity College Dublin and Bournemouth University. Their paper is titled “Continental influx and pervasive matrilocality in Iron Age Britain,” and the Iron Age burials of Pocklington in East Yorkshire are just one of several Celtic-era sites mentioned across Iron Age Britain. Others include Worlebury (Somerset), Bottle Knap (Dorset), Gravelly Guy (Oxfordshire), Trethellan Farm and Tregunnel (Cornwall), and a number of other sites connected to the Durotrigian peoples of Dorset and Somerset. What all of these burials have in common is an overwhelming pattern of matrilocality. Aka, women of the same motherlines living and dying in close-knit communities. Aka, women not leaving their natal “motherhouses” upon marriage. Aka, matrilineal descent being a bond of central cultural value. Aka, something nobody thought was very common in Iron Age Europe, and that many have argued was never a reality in Europe in any meaningful way (cue the huge ongoing debate about the work of Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, and the subject of my entire course When Women Were the Land with Advaya).
In the West, we are culturally so accustomed to the historical idea that women once had to weave and sew and embroider elaborate dowries, essentially paying their future husbands to take them, and then move away to their husband’s homes upon marriage, often quite far from their natal hearths, to give birth and often become half subservient to an unfamiliar mother-in-law. We see this pattern so often— from Homer’s Odyssey to Arthurian romances to the Grimm’s fairytales— that imagining the historical alternative can sound like a fantasy.
But as this new research shows, at Pocklington in East Yorkshire (to cite just one of the many examples they share) 28 out of 33 of the women tested belonged to the same three maternal lineages. In other words, imagine three grandmothers and the branching trees of their sisters, daughters, granddaughters, and nieces. These were the predominant female lineages at the site over a period of at least 600 years (717 bce all the way until around 50 bce). The men in the burial site, on the other hand, were from many diverse patrilines. What this means is that the men, not women, were the ones who moved location upon marriage. Men came to live with their wives, and their wives’ families, not the other way around.
What this means, among so many other things, is that a woman giving birth was not alone in a new tribe or clan or region with her mother-in-law and her husband’s family, but surrounded by her own mother, aunts, sisters, cousins. What this means is that if something happened to a woman’s husband, she and their children were still held and surrounded by her natal, maternal kin. What this means is that all those Roman accounts of wildly powerful Gaulish, Celtic, Germanic, Brythonic tribal women — warriors, seers, queens, healers, spiritual leaders—were demonstrative of cultural patterns of matrilineal sovereignty and remembrance.
Now, the study notes that interestingly, in surveys of Neolithic and Bronze Age Bell Beaker culture burials in Britain (from around 2000 bce- 1200 or so bce), the evidence shows patrilocality, not matrilocality— women moving, or being taken to live with their husbands’ families. So what we are seeing in Iron Age Britain is not necessarily the “final hurrah” of matrilineal, matrilocal women-centric cultures that had been around forever, but rather a renaissance. A resurgence. A resurrection, I want to say. The paper argues that it’s possible that the waves of Iron Age migrations of Celtic-language-speaking peoples from the continent were part of the reason for this pattern.
There is so much more I could say about this. There are so very many layers to this story in the lands of Iron Age Europe, Bronze Age Europe, Neolithic Europe, Paleolithic Europe, and these layers vary from land to land, language to language, era to era. I’m in a state of constant apprenticeship to this question of the old motherlines of my European ancestors, and the patterns of our buried laws of sovereignty, the patterns of our buried stories of birth and death and living well upon and without our Mother, Earth.
I’m going to restrain myself from launching into a whole overview of the waves of Indo-European migrations that changed the landscape of Neolithic Europe beginning in the 4th millennia bce, or we’d be here all day. But what I will say is that even though those waves of conquest and culture change resulted in so much loss, so many shattered matrilocal, matrifocal languages and ways, what this study reminds me is that they were never truly lost. What this study suggests to me is that wherever there is a chance, an opening, a shift— whatever exactly that shift was in the Iron Age of Britain, I am going to keep listening and studying to find out more—women have always found ways to remember again, to gather together again, to re-organize their communities in ways that better support the wellbeing of mothers, children, and therefore all people.
That, I think, is one of the things these mothers in the earth of Iron Age Britain are trying to say to us through the lines of these scientific papers today. Gather together, daughters. Gather with your young and gather with your old and do whatever you can to weave worlds that promote life. At any moment, you can return to this way. Women of lost Britain, you walked through witch-burning centuries, you walked through hell, and you are still here. Gather together again, and tell your stories new.
Now, as it happens, this story about the matrilines of Pocklington has a rather personal twist to it for me.
Just this past Thursday, the day after the study came out, my mother and I had an appointment to get matching tattoos of mother-shaped vessels (with arms for handles, and broad hips, and other secret, shared symbols) to honor the two pilgrimages we had made together in November of 2023 and July of 2024 to the land of our motherline in East Yorkshire.